11/16/07 More Nikko

Ok, now more Nikko touring. This place is an incredible tourist spot. At the end of the day I had taken over 200 pictures. As we continued our stroll towards the main buildings, we saw several other notable things.

Nikko is almost a waste of magnificence. If any one of these things was set someplace by itself, it would be worth going to take a look. But there are so many intricate carvings here, though, that by the end I was thoroughly uninterested in seeing even one more wooden animal covered in gold leaf.

Opposite the stable with all of the cool little monkey carvings was this structure. It has some interesting carvings on it, among which is an "interesting approximation of an elephant, carved by an artist who had clearly never seen one" (wikitravel).

This huge stack of carvings marked the entrance to the to what I believe is Toshogu itself.

We had a descent climb up a few cases of tall stone steps when we reached the grave site itself. After the wonders we had just passed, the grave seemed very subdued. The weather was awesome for a place like this though. It had been very sunny, but at this point in the day a bit of a fog had developed. So everything was covered in a bit of a bright, misty halo.

The weather provided some dramatic effect here.

Here are a few other cool things that I saw in random places.

Let it be known that when I die I'm going to want some giant stone warriors near my headstone.

A pretty excellent five-story pagoda.


This is one of my favorite pictures from the whole day.


You can have whatever you want, as long as its green tea in a can.

More later!